Is what we thought when we came across our house for the first time. It was far from being in mint condition but it ticked most, if not all of the boxes for our first home. Min 2 bedrooms? Tick! Garden? Tick – south facing one too! Within safe walking distance to a station? Tick! Victorian? Tick! Split over 3 levels? Bonus! There’s a few good schools around the area which is a plus, but not a priority right now.

Although the house needs a lot of work, it has heaps of potential and that is why we’re willing to put our blood, sweat and tears into giving it a huge makeover – nothing a lick of paint can’t fix!

Having never done any form of DIY before, we decided to tackle the guestroom first as a test run. Figured if we could get the room looking half decent then we’d give the rest of the house a good crack. About an hour on Youtube and we were ready to get started. Before we got to painting though, there was a whole load of prepping to be done.

One of the very first things needed was to strip all the lime green wallpaper from the walls. Being an old Victorian house, there were many layers of stubborn wallpaper underneath the surface. A steamer helped but a fair amount of elbow grease was essential to remove every trace. Scrap, scrape, scrape and off goes the wallpaper! Next step was to go over any crevices and fill it with putty. Followed by sanding down the surface for a smooth finish. And then came the glorious task of hanging wallpaper (lining paper in our case).

Now the surefire way to hanging wallpaper is making sure it’s set in the right angle as to not cause any creases and avoiding the likelihood of air bubbles – easier said than done! It’s a good arm workout, I can tell you that much. The tricky part was going over light switches and power sockets, I left those bits for Adam to sort out. The final step before picking up a paint brush was to go over all the skirting boards, window and door frames with masking tape – another dreary task!

Finally came the fun bit. Splish, splash splosh goes the paint into the roller tray. Using a wide roller brush, I worked my way up and down the walls until every surface was covered, save for the corners and sides – Adam followed closely behind with a paint brush to touch up the exposed bits. In hindsight, we really should’ve done it the other way around for a nicer finish. Noted for next time! Once we were done with the second coat, it now came time to remove the masking tape from the edges. To our horror, the masking tape picked up layers of the paint (we’d worked so hard to apply) along as we were peeling it off. It wasn’t until Adam’s folks mentioned it needed to be ripped off while the paint was still wet that we realised what we did wrong. Doh! Rookie error – lesson learnt!

Some progress shots of our handy work so far….

It was really worth going through the laborious task of hanging the lining paper up as it made a huge difference to the end result. Turns out we’re not too shabby with a paint brush after all!